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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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Interesting article.

In countries where prior restraint is common, keeping the target of an investigation in the dark might be the only way to publish at all. Of course, in the US prior restraint is virtually non-existent, so that this certainly does not apply to this case.

Likewise, there might be tactical considerations not confront the target of an investigation early on. "Dear Macbeth, just as an heads up, we are currently investigating an alleged involvement of you into the demise of the previous king" is certainly not required. But if you have spend months gathering the facts, then you should give the other party some time to respond.

In general, there is a cooperative mindset and an adversarial mindset. From my perspective, both can be wrong in some cases. If your target has clearly defected from humanity so completely that no further cooperation with them is ever possible, trying to destroy them with your investigation may be imperative. So if you discover proof that the Nazis are running death camps, you will probably not want to give them two weeks of time to do damage control, preempt your story by releasing damning information with their own framing and generally put their spin on it.

In the real world, few people and organisations are so beyond redemption that destroying them by turning arguments into soldiers is worth the price on your soul and the damage to the epistemic commons. The Sequences are very clear that humans are not naturally good on doing Bayesian updates from partisan information.

Civil courts work (mostly) with two adversarial sides presenting self-interested arguments because there are certain standards of evidence and the judges know the takes to be partisan and spent some effort to find the truth between the stories of both sides.

The court of public opinion may occasionally stumble on the truth if a matter appears very one-sided and also is very one-sided, but in most cases, almost nobody will find the shy flower of the truth on the Verdun-esque battlefield left by unrestricted argument warfare.